Tweets with a cool 8-bit vibe seen on an Apple IIe

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Retro fans and long-time Apple enthusiasts will like this one. Apparently a guy has breathed new life into his Apple IIe by transforming it into a Twitter-wall machine that renders tweets in cool 8-bit retro graphics.

According to a post at Make Magazine, a Twitter user “yergacheffe,” who also maintains a tech blog at atomsandelectrons.com, has found new uses for his aging Apple IIe system – turning it into a Twitter-wall machine. According to his blog post detailing the enthusiastic project, the machine’s 8-bit CPU and 64KB RAM lack the power to retrieve the tweets.

Instead, the Apple IIe simply renders a twitter feed retrieved on a PC. The Apple IIe’s limited color graphics have resulted in a cool 8-bit vibe that will no doubt delight fans of retro:

The Apple II has an 8-bit 6502 CPU running at 1 MHz, so it can literally execute thousands of instructions per second. In other words, it’s about a million times slower that the computer you are using right now. So I wasn’t about to write a networking stack or Twitter client on the Apple II itself. Just like the TweetWall the communication with Twitter would happen on a PC and the Apple is just used for display.

Apple IIe ruled home computing in the early ’80s. The third, enhanced incarnation of the Apple II series, the Apple IIe files as the longest-lived personal computer in Apple’s history. The company had been manufacturing and selling the Apple IIe for a whopping eleven years, thanks to the fact that the system packed in rich expansion possibilities and a bunch of features previously offered as paid upgrades at the time.

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lonegunmen

That brings back memories. Still love the old 5 1/4″ floppies. I still have my Apple IIc in storage. It still worked the last time I dragged it out. Hmmm…might have to do that again real soon. Remember the puncher or using a pair of scissors to make the disk double-sided?